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Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Two Classes ...

A double period yesterday of Creative Writing, another, today, of EAL.

I wanted to give my Year 7 EAL class a break from the grammar folders through which they're working - you can't do a double period of grammar worksheets anyway and they get restless doing the same sort of stuff every week. Lily, their regular teacher, agreed. She had suggested some spelling exercises from a book she is checking out, but hasn't gone very far with it yet and it's a "course" you're supposed to do weekly. It also, as I found when I opened it, has references to "your rules booklet" (what rules booklet?).

In the end, I used her ESL Games book and a literacy exercise on syllables. They picked up the syllables very quickly - some had already done syllables in their home countries, but even those who hadn't done it before got it right once I put the rules up on the board.

The Games book included a vocabulary exercise on transport and a game board using the vocab. They played the game and seemed to enjoy it.

The second half of the lesson we went online to do Freerice, a vocabulary game in which for every right answer 10 grains of rice are donated to charity. They all got decent scores and enjoyed the game, learning new words as they went.

Next week, back to grammar exercises, but with some extras.

I only had four students in Creative Writing yesterday. That gave me the chance to sit down with each individual student and discuss what they were working on. Two of the boys admitted that their stories were just not working for them. One of them said he was working on a story in his literacy class - he had just begun and it was about a puffer fish, a la Finding Nemo. We went through the outline together and broke it down till he had an outline from beginning to end. I begged him not to make it more than a few hundred words.

The other boy had actually started his replacement story, but wasn't sure where it was going. Again, we discussed it and wrote out an outline, beginning to end. He came up with some ideas as we talked and became quite excited about it. Fingers crossed!

The next student refused to admit the story was too much for him, said he liked it - but has only done a few paragraphs. So we discussed it and I wrote the outline and just as I was writing "and he goes home" my student said, "Oh, but that's not the end, Miss!" Finally, I suggested - firmly - that he write the story to the ending we had done so far and, if he had time, he could do a sequel, "The Return of ..." . He won't, of course. But if I can get him to finish this one, I will heave a sigh of relief.

Inaam, the only girl, was bogged down in her horror story. She told me what she had in mind for the ending and we worked out how to get there. Hopefully, the outline will help her. She is the only one who hasn't been weaving from past tense to present and back again - most of her errors are punctuation and lack of capitals at the start of sentences.

I think that class worked well - let's see if those individual discussions made a difference.

About Me

I'm a writer, librarian, book reviewer, educator. I live in a beachside suburb of Melbourne with a lot of pot plants, but no cats. I slush fiction for Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and hope that each one that arrives is going to be a potential Hugo winner.